AMD partners with LiquidSky for Radeon RX Vega cloud gaming

AMD has announced a partnership with cloud gaming specialist LiquidSky, with the company picking AMD's upcoming Radeon RX Vega graphics cards to power its refreshed infrastructure.

Startup LiquidSky made headlines earlier this year with the announcement that it was to offer advertising-funded free access to its cloud gaming platform, allowing users to view adverts as a means of building up a bank of time which can then be spent playing triple-A PC games on low-end hardware including smartphones and tablets. Now, the company is joining forces with AMD to equip its virtual machines with high-end Radeon RX Vega graphics processors.

'Vega truly democratises access to enthusiast class game experiences, whether gamers are tapping into this power on a home PC or through a cloud-based game streaming service,' crowed Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of the Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. 'LiquidSky and Vega are a perfect match. Radeon MxGPU technology already delivers exceptional quality of service for graphics workloads, and with Radeon Virtualised Encode the full end-to-end game streaming pipeline gets the same benefit.'

'LiquidSky's game streaming service delivers the very best visuals, detail, and pure performance, regardless of the device you're using,' added Ian McLoughlin, LiquidSky co-founder and CEO. 'AMD's Vega-based GPUs will have the perfect blend of bleeding-edge hardware virtualisation features and tremendous rendering horsepower. This means consistent framerates and quality of service that's simply not possible with existing technologies.'

Neither company has detailed the precise specifications of the Radeon RX Vega cards that will power LiquidSky's refreshed server infrastructure. Equally, AMD is officially silent on the commercial launch of the 14nm next-generation graphics processor family, beyond a commitment to release devices in the second quarter of this year - somewhat later than the Q1 2017 schedule it announced late last year.